Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of electronic communications, and more particularly to the field of intercepting and unifying communications across various systems.
Discussion of the State of the Art
Today's consumer has many options when it comes to how they can communicate with the companies they do business with. Communication technology has expanded rapidly over the last 10 years, led by web and mobile applications that provide the customer with more information and options than ever before. While options are typically a good thing, the rapid expansion in applications and channels has created some challenges for the enterprises that deploy them and the customers that try to use them.
While technology providers speak about unified communications across the enterprise, very little true integration has been done across channels to truly unify technology and information in an intelligent way that reduces the steps and provides a proactive and positive experience for the customer. Enterprises utilize services such as web, mobile, inbound and outbound voice, text, email and chat, and these channels are supported by routing, IVR, and ACD systems on the back end. Most enterprises utilize multiple providers for each of these technologies, and each provider typically supports a different strategy putting their technology in the center of the overall solution. This approach usually ends up not producing the desired results.
Enterprises are quickly deploying these technologies and are seeing some success in a limited scope, but when viewing the process from the customer perspective there can be a higher level of difficulty in getting their questions answered. Usually technology decisions are made by different departments/organizations within the enterprise, and each for different reasons, which further complicates the matter for the customer. Customers may start in one channel and end up crossing two or three additional channels trying to accomplish their goal, and each time they must restart their process from the beginning in order to navigate to the right information or resource that can help.
What is needed is a means to intercept communications across a variety of channels, and enable a unified approach to handling these communications.